Jacques Fosse, a famous rescuer

Jacques Fosse, merchant in Beaucaire, was gifted with one of those vigorous natures and powerful constitutions to which danger is a spur, and it is therefore not surprising that Fosse has become the major rescuer of southern France and of all places where there’s been dangers to be faced and lives to be saved.
Fosse was ten years old when, for the first time, he gave evidence of his intrepidity by pulling out of the River Rhone a man who had sunk under a raft. From thirteen to fifteen, he saved five people; in 1836, at the Beaucaire fair, he snatched from the waters of the Rhone two travelling performers in pursuit of a bear, their only wealth, fallen into the river, and after a long and dangerous struggle, the animal itself, which seemed in little mood to let itself be caught again. In 1839 after four successive rescues, Fosse, who was then twenty years old, got his first silver medal, followed in 1840 by a second one, that five more rescues had earned him. On the very year he entered the military service, he saved the life of three gunners of the Besançon garrison, and he won another medal for pulling out of the Rhine, in Strasbourg, two drowning soldiers and their horses.
 
Extract from L’Illustration, N° 774 on 26 December 1857.